I am not a collector, I’m just not good at throwing things away.  My computers are all ones I bought new.  All except for this Powerbook 180.  I bought a Powerbook 180 new, and used it for many years.  I upgraded it to 14 MBytes of memory (which is the maximum it could take) and a 500 MByte hard disk.  But I unwisely parted with it in 1999, when I bought the Lombard.  The Lombard is great, but I have always regretted leaving the old Powerbook behind.  Recently, I had a chance to acquire a Powerbook 180.  Actually, I got two of them, neither of which was working.  I was lucky that they had different things wrong with them.  One started up okay, but had a non-functional floppy disk drive, and a screen with the dreaded tunnel vision problem.  The other had suffered from a bad battery leak, and wouldn’t start.  It was impossible to tell for sure what might be working on it, but it turned out to have a good screen, and a working floppy disk.  Also, one of them had a 10 MByte memory expansion board (needed to get to 14 MByte total) and one had a working 120 MByte hard disk.  Later I found a working 500 MByte 2.5” SCSI hard disk.  Combining the best parts of both computers and the new disk, and after buying a new (yes new) battery, I ended up with a machine indistinguishable from the one I left behind over 10 years ago.

   The screen problem is not something I ever heard about when my Powerbook was new.  I remember that some of the TFT active matrix screens on these machines had bad pixels.  My old PB 180 had a single bad pixel that was always white.  I remember exactly where on the screen it was.  But the bad screen on one of my new powerbooks was fine when it started up, and over a minute or two it started to turn black at the corners.  The black spread from the corners toward the center.  After a few minutes, there was only a central circular region that could be used.  I’m told this is caused by moisture getting into the LCD. 

   The insides of a 100-series powerbook are roomier, and working on one is way easier than working on a modern macbook, or even a G3 Powerbook.  But like a lot of stuff built in the 1980s and 1990s, the plastic that they are made of has aged, and become brittle and fragile.  The worst parts are the posts to which everything is screwed down to the case.  Almost everything in there is held down by Torx screws that are screwed into metal posts that are embedded in the plastic of the case.  The plastic at the attachment points of those posts break when you try to unscrew the screws, and the metal posts come free of the case.  This happened to about 3 of the posts on my powerbook.  I reattached them to the case using epoxy.  I hope they hold.  At least the dark gray cases don’t yellow.

What was so great about the Powerbook 180?

    The original line of Powerbooks, given numbers in the 100’s, had Motorola 68000 family CPUs.  They did not have PowerPC processors.  The name Powerbook got associated with Power CPU’s later, starting with the 5000 series Powerbooks.  The Powerbook 100 had a 68000 (the same processor as the original Macintosh) running at 16 MHz (twice the speed of the original Macintosh).  It was introduced in 1991, along with two other models, the 140 (with

a 16 MHz 68030) and the 170 (with a 25 MHz 68030 and the 68882 floating point processor).  The 100 and 140 had passive matrix monochrome (1 bit) screens.  The 170 had an active matrix monochrome screen.  The 100 never got upgraded, but the 140 led to the 145 and 145b, running at 25 MHz and with more memory onboard (but all with a maximum of 8 MBytes). The 170 was replaced by the Powerbook 180 in 1992.  Like the 170, the 180 had a Motorola 68030 processor (but running at 35 MHz), and a 68882 floating point processor.  But it could have up to 14 MBytes of memory, and a 4 bit grayscale active matrix screen.  At the same time as the 180, Apple introduced the Powerbook 160 series, that initially had a 25 MHz 68030, could also take 14 MBytes of memory, and had a 4 bit grayscale screen, but was passive matrix. The 160 later got upgraded to the 165, which had a faster processor. 

    The only Motorola 68k Powerbooks I ever considered buying were the 170 and 180.  This was because I needed a floating point processor for my work.  I was lucky to not have the money to buy a 170 in 1991, so the 180 was available when I was ready to buy.  It turned out that having 14 MBytes was important, and the grayscale screen on the 180 is still incredibly beautiful, and vastly superior to the 170.

    Later, there were color versions of the 165 and the 180.  Both of them have floating point processors, and they’re both great.  But by that time I had my 180.  The last m68k Powerbook was the 190.  It had a 68LC040 processor.  This processor was also used on the 500 series powerbooks, except for the rare 550c, which was only sold in Japan, and only for a short time there.  It was a special hobbled version of the 68040 in which the floating point processor (which was integrated into the 68040) was removed.  What a shame.

   The 100-180 series Powerbooks had a trackball.  The 190, and all subsequent Macintosh Powerbooks had a trackpad.  Trackpads must be better, because they took over and nobody ever looked back.  The best stuff always wins, doesn’t it?  Well, I must be crazy, because until 2-finger scrolling appeared on the aluminum powerbooks, I never liked trackpads as much as the trackball on my 180.  But I gotta admit, the latest Apple trackpads are really great.

Still Useful?

    Back then, I used to run system 7.5 and a full set software on my Powerbook 180.  At that time I was using Canvas 3.5 for graphics, Nisus Writer for word processing, Mathematic v2, and MPW for programming.  All of that stuff still works great on my new old Powerbook.  It also is great for games, because of the trackball.  My favorites are flight simulators, Fokker Triplane v2.89, and Hellcats.  I also used Tenon MachTen Professional on my Powerbook 180.  This was a strange beast.  It is a Unix operating system that runs as a Macintosh task in System 7.  It has a full set of Unix tools, and ran every X11 program I ever needed.  I found my old copy of MachTen Professional and it now runs again, on the new PB180. 

   The Powerbook 180 is a little larger than today’s Macbooks, and a little heavier.  But it still seems modern and it’s design is beautiful and functional.  Look at that beautiful bright screen.  It sure is good to have my Powerbook back.